Page:Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia (IA cu31924012301754).pdf/281

 of the Inquisition against Galileo, and which must therefore be briefly mentioned.

This was nothing less than an attempt to show that even if Galileo held the Copernican system to be the only true one, he could, thanks to the wording of the formula of recantation, utter it without doing violence to his conscience; or, what is now known to be truth. Galileo swore that he never had believed and never would believe (1) "that the sun was the centre of the earth and immovable." That he could easily do, says our author, for, in relation to the fixed stars, the sun by no means forms the centre; and heavy bodies on the earth fall towards its centre and not towards the sun, which, also, in this sense, was not the centre! There was no difficulty for Galileo in recanting that the sun was immovable, for he had himself concluded from the motion of the spots that it revolved on its own axis. As to the earth, he abjured it as an error (2) that "the earth is not the centre;" quite right, for it is the centre for heavy bodies: and it was not said—"the centre of the universe;" (3) "that the earth moves;" vast efforts of sophistry were necessary to make this desperately precise proposition square with the arguments of this curious casuist. He therefore says, that as, according to the wording, it is not the diurnal motion of the earth that is in question, this proposition has quite a different meaning, in which, on the one hand, it must be said that the earth is immovable, and on the other, that it is only motion through the air from one place to another that is excluded. The earth may certainly, both in relation to its physical conformation and in contrast to what goes on upon it, be called immovable! At the time when these lines were written, in 1875, the author of this article in the "Historisch-politischen Blättern" was unknown to us. Afterwards, through the liberality of the Bavarian Government, among other works relating to Galileo